Yet Another Refugee from Livejournal

In my last post I described a situation, then asked, in effect, "If you find yourself in this situation, what should you do?"  Then I told you to stay tuned for the answer.  So now it's high time to end the suspense, right?

Yes, but first, I need to clarify the situation, as I presented it last time.  So here goes.

The hypothesis is that you're worried about some terrible thing that might happen.  Your "rational mind" has told you that it probably won't happen—indeed, that it's so unlikely that it isn't worth worrying about.  And yet, you find that you can't stop (worrying, that is).

That's an abstract outline of the situation.  But the imagined situation that I presented was more concrete: I did specify the nature of that "terrible thing that might happen," which was the occasion of your worry.  Namely, you were concerned about the possibility that Donald Trump might become president again.

And not that he might do so just any old way; I was more specific still.  I raised the possibility that it might happen, in the 2024 election cycle, and after the votes were cast, because some state legislature didn't accept their voters' choice for president, and substituted their own preferred slate of presidential electors.

And that, I asked you to imagine, was the possibility you couldn't stop worrying about.

If you found yourself in that predicament, then what, indeed, would I advise you to do?

After all that buildup, I'm not going to give you "the" answer.  I'm going to give you an answer: something that might be worth considering.  Might be worth it, at least, if you're open to the possibility that your self-knowledge is not perfect.  (For what it's worth, I don't believe that anyone's is, most certainly including my own.)

So: despite careful consideration, you cannot shake the cognitive dissonance between your rational estimation of the likelihood of the terrible event in question, and the emotional distress that proceeds from the thought of it.  If that's the case, consider the possibility that the real cause of your distress is not … not exactly, not entirely … what you've been telling yourself it is.

What else might it be?  Perhaps our recent experience with Trump has reminded you of something that's been true for a much longer time: that the USA has relatively weak social welfare programs, compared to most other highly developed (i.e. rich) countries.  In matters of health care, education, retirement, unemployment insurance, and on and on … we have greater inequality: more specifically, Americans are more vulnerable.  Even those of us who seem fairly secure can, as a result of some bad luck, become, rather suddenly, much less so.

And of course, dear reader, I am simply assuming, in what I write, that you think it should be otherwise: you think that government, in the USA, should be providing more of a safety net.

But wait.  As I said, this deficiency in our social welfare programs is nothing new.  That being the case, isn't it far-fetched to suppose that, when you think you are worrying specifically about Donald Trump's regaining the presidency (by fair means or foul), the real underlying cause of your anxiety is this longstanding difference between the USA and most other rich countries?

Perhaps not quite so far-fetched, if you consider a couple of things that are new—or at least, more obvious than they used to be.  Consider, for one, the large numbers of people who are not just indifferent to social welfare programs: they are actively hostile to them.  And in particular, the fact that a great many of those people are not rich: they are, themselves, among the more economically vulnerable folks in this nation.

And here's something else that also seems to me to make my hypothesis more plausible: our experiences in the Time of Trump could be causing us to see old problems, like the shortcomings of American social welfare programs, in a new light.  Namely: perhaps it has relatively recently come to your attention that a great many Americans are willing and able to believe things that are, in your view [and mine], patently false.  (It is one of my working assumptions that there is a distinction, even if not always clear-cut, between "matters of fact" and "matters of opinion".  And I am talking about patently false beliefs about matters that, in my view, rightly belong in the former category.)

If I'm right about that, then is this latest point—that many Americans are surprisingly willing to believe utter nonsense—itself something new, or just something that's become more obvious?  I readily admit that I don't know, but I suspect that it's some of both.  There have been changes in how people communicate with another, and specifically in how people get (what they accept as) news.  Let me put it like this: the potential for people to be awfully credulous has always been there, but it does seem plausible that recent developments have caused that potential to be more fully developed.

Here's a relatively succinct, somewhat less formal, statement of at least part of my point.  We have millions of people in this country who profess the belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.  I don't fully understand how they can believe that, but still: if they do believe that, then is it so surprising that they can also believe, for example, that Obamacare (especially if you call it by that name) is a very bad thing—for the country, and specifically for themselves?

So there you have it.  We have this relatively new issue: the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.  And we have this much older issue: the belief, by those who are politically left of center, that American social welfare programs are insufficient.  And finally, we have my claim: that the emergence of the former issue—and, in particular, what that emergence says about the mental faculties of many of the American poeple—has affected the outlook of many of us left-of-center people.  In particular, and perhaps more than we realize, it has tended to undermine our confidence in how quickly and easily "public opinion" about the older-bread-and-butter issues can be changed.

And thus I say: it's not far-fetched to suppose that, if you are feeling anxiety which, on the surface, is tied to Trumpy issues like the "stolen" election, that anxiety may be masking another one: an anxiety about what the emergence of the new, Trumpy issues may portend about the prospects for progress on the old, bread-and-butter ones.

So.  Am I done?  I made a sort of promise to you—my hypothetical reader with anxieties curiously like my own.  I said that I would give you some guidance.  Have I done that?

I guess that depends on what sort of guidance you were expecting.  I certainly haven't told you what petition to sign, or what meeting to attend.  But I don't really believe that you thought I would.

I am certain of one thing: that I have helped, at least, myself.  I have written myself into an improved state of mind.  I am less in the thrall of an obsessive emotional hangover, from which I have been suffering since January 20 or so.  I refer, of course, to the obession with the possibility of Trump's regaining the presidency, particularly by non-democratic means.

How did I do that?  It wasn't by some feat of logic: I haven't proven anything, not even to myself.  You could say, instead, that I have distracted myself; I have successfully widened my attention to a larger set of concerns.  By shifting my attention, even for a short time, I managed to obtain a more lasting effect: I restarted the process of thinking, actively, about these other issues, which had been mostly forgotten during the emergency.  And once restarted, that process took on, again, a momentum of its own.

It wasn't simply a matter of distraction, though; if it were, the replacement concerns could have been entirely unrelated, in their subject matter, to the original obsession.  I am sure that the transition was helped by my noticing, along the way, the connections between the issues.  I found that I better understood the older, "bread and butter" issues by seeing them in the light of the mentally grotesque "issues" that were brought to us by Trump.  And vice versa.

Sometimes this kind of mental reorientation works, and sometimes it doesn't.  It's not entirely a conscious thing, and certainly not something that can be accomplished by sheer force of will.

But who knows?  If you actually have been suffering from anxieties like mine, then it just might work for you, too.